Seamless and GrubHub, two nearly identical online food-ordering companies whose business model consists of providing a service that is already available for free, announced Monday that they would be merging into one giant online food-ordering hydra. The new company, which has not yet settled on a name, will enable and promote social anxiety in 500 U.S. cities by eliminating the traumatic element of "human verbal interaction" from pizza delivery. The co-founder and CEO of GrubHub will serve as the CEO of the new Sterling Cooper Draper Seamless Grubhub. The CEO of Seamless will serve as president. If your cat dies, the new organization will probably start a twitter fight with you about it.

Yesterday my cat died.

His name was Houdini because I thought a black cat should have a magical name. We adopted him from the Humane Society when I was 11. My family always said he was lucky because when he was very young, he was hit (and badly injured) by a car, and subsequently disappeared for three days. I suppose you could also say he was unlucky, because when he was very young, he was hit by a car, and subsequently disappeared for three days. A late night emergency surgery left him with a slightly off-kilter gait, but he remained agile and affectionate for the next thirteen years.

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Last night, I mentioned his death on Twitter to @Seamless. @Seamless and I had already been chatting because I was trying to game them out of a $7 friend-referral fee. (If you invite a friend to join Seamless using a unique referral code, you can get a $7 coupon. I was trying to get the coupon retroactively, without the code. I didn't particularly expect my petition to be successful, but I had 20 minutes to kill before Mad Men started and they had $7 coups to give away.)

I told @Seamless I was dying and that the only thing that could save me was $7, which wasn't true.

Then I mentioned that my cat had died a few hours prior, which was true. In retrospect, I see how this could read as a lie.

@seamless Don't want 2 put you in an awk position but my cat died today (RIP Houdini) so please be sensitive to that & don't burn me on this

But @Seamless, was in too deep to ever stop making jokes about my dead cat. It had, by this point, ceased to be a popular internet food ordering company. Its revised mission statement read simply: The dead cat — make fun of it.

@caityweaver That's an oddly specific penultimate dying wish for a cat to have imho

Congrats to Seamless and GrubHub, two companies that POSSIBLY (I mean, I don't know — we have no way of knowing — but it seems incredibly likely) serve chopped up dead cats inside the carne asada tacos you order from them, on their merger.

Update: Before writing this post, I sent an email to Seamless to let them know that my cat REALLY DID DIE yesterday. I've just received a kind apology ("We here at Seamless are deeply sorry for your loss") and an offer of two free meals. Hopefully this lavishly catered memorial buffet will fill the cat-shaped hole in my heart.